....another was the Lancastria. She lay 3 miles offshore of St. Nazire, where 9,000 troops were ferried out to her. She had been waiting some time for the order to sail, when at 4 p.m. a bomb from a Dornier crashed through the deck which put her on her side within 20 minutes. Around 5,000 men were lost (the official report said 3,000), some were drowned, being trapped below decks, others were killed by machine gun fire from German planes as they swam away or clung to wreckage.

This one bomb caused as great a loss of life as all the thousand bombs dropped on shipping during the last 4 weeks. Churchill forbade details of the disaster being made public because of the effect on morale.

This is a photograph of the Lancastria 'going down' and it is very errie to know that my father was somewhere on that photograph fighting for his life?